Smart Glasses to Help People With Poor Vision to Navigate, Recognize People and Things

Oxford University is touting the work of its researchers who are building a special set of electronic glasses that may help people with all sorts of vision conditions. Cameras in the frame would analyze the scene ahead and active glass would display important things either in a different part of the frame of view or interpret it with colors, brightness, and basic representations. The idea is being profiled at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition where visitors get to see how the system would function.

From details from Oxford Science Blog:

The glasses have video cameras mounted at the corners to capture what the wearer is looking at, while a display of tiny lights embedded in the see-through lenses of the glasses feed back extra information about objects, people or obstacles in view.

In between, a smartphone-type computer running in your pocket recognises objects in the video image or tracks where a person is, driving the lights in the display in real time.

The extra information the glasses display about their surroundings should allow people to navigate round a room, pick out the most relevant things and locate objects placed nearby.

The see-through display means other people can see you, while different light colours might allow different types of information to be fed back to the wearer, Stephen [Dr Stephen Hicks of the Department of Clinical Neurology at Oxford] says. You could have different colours for people, or important objects, and brightness could tell you how near things were.